


Don't You Just Hate It When

by aliquotscum



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Aliens, Dimension Travel, Gen, One Shot Collection, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-04-28
Updated: 2016-07-19
Packaged: 2018-06-04 23:52:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 15,063
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6680965
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aliquotscum/pseuds/aliquotscum
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A series of one-shots exploring some misunderstandings, confrontations, and generally awkward moments Ford might have had on that 30-year trip. Potentially, this could go on for a while.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

He materializes upside-down and underwater, obviously.

Ford claps his hands over his nose and mouth and braces for a monstrous wave, the sting of hydrochloric acid, a sudden violent temperature shift. Or maybe space and physiology work differently in this dimension and he’ll be trapped here, unable to drown as he paddles uselessly for a surface a thousand league away that may not even exist. That should keep Bill entertained for a while. He’s less prepared for the soft brush of solid ground against his back, or the curious little brown fish darting overhead when he cracks one eye open. Above them, through the cloud of silt billowing slowly upward around him, light dances so temptingly close within reach that it’s maddening.

 _This is a trap_ , he tells himself, even as he kicks off towards it and marvels at how nothing bursts from the ground to grab at him. _You didn’t escape, he just wants you to think you did so it’ll hurt more when he sets this place on fire too. You’ll never get out of his world. Maybe all of the others belong to him already anyway._ Ford tells himself this and more, but he still can’t entirely smother the treacherous anticipation building in him as he rapidly gains momentum.

He breaks through the surface and takes a hasty breath, followed by a deeper one when the air doesn’t sear his lungs or transform him into a giant insect. The shock of normalcy still makes him cough and sputter a little, but he forces himself to recover and swims for the nearest shore as soon as he spots it. His shaking arms can only propel him for a short burst, but the current doesn’t fight much and the water shallows out enough for him to walk the rest of the way sooner than he expected, so that’s all he needs. It’s a river, he concludes, trudging through it. Freshwater. Even clean, before his steps stir up the sediment at the bottom. He stumbles out until he’s only waist deep and starts checking himself for injuries, trying to ignore how mild the breeze is here, how pleasant the lilting birdsong. Surely Bill can’t think he’s that stupid. It’s almost a relief when he feels eyes on him from the shore, but when he looks up to glare at the source his certainty falters.

Ford has seen evil countless times, in and out of just as many different disguises. “Ponderous teal aardvark-shaped creatures doing their laundry” is…an oddly specific one. Two of them have bonnets on. The bonnets have flower patterns. If this is demonic illusion, it’s either the best he’s seen so far or the silliest.

There’s a moment where they all regard each other in silence, Ford still patting himself distractedly for bruised ribs and three of the smaller creatures still clutching the large, dripping shawl they were lifting out of the water together. Then the bigger one sitting next to them wrinkles its snout, folds its arms over its washboard, and says, in the universal tones of a disapproving aunt, “You’d have better luck climbing out on the other side.”

Ford blinks at her and turns mechanically to face the opposite shore. It’s a farther swim, but the land forms a beach that slopes down to the water much more gradually that the flat drop-off from the surrounding forest over here. He squints, but can’t spot anything obviously deadly lurking on that side either. “You’re right,” he sighs.

“Oh, did you fall in trying to reach some of those berries back around the last bend?” one of the smaller aardvarks asks. She has a jaunty purple stripe crossing diagonally through the fur on her face. “I hate that! All the best-looking ones grow where you can hardly ever get to them.”

“You could grab onto those roots sticking out over there and pull yourself up,” her neighbor suggests, blinking two sets of eyelids in rapid alternating succession. Something tells Ford quite strongly the gesture is meant to be coquettish.

“Gonna catch digger rot,” the eldest says, sniffing disinterestedly. “Standin’ around there gawping like a wet idjit.”

“Hold on.” Ford slides his hands up under his glasses and presses against his closed eyes, trying to focus. The raw adrenaline that’s sustained him for so long is starting to flag and leave him with a head full of smog. He knows from the lightness at his hip that the knife he had is gone too, either buried in the riverbed or drifting out of reach somewhere downstream. Maybe that’s for the best right now. “I just. Need to get my bearings, I haven’t…”

He trails off, lowering his hands a fraction to watch the edges of the clothes still floating dreamily in the water near him. They’re made from some kind of thick plant-based fabric, weathered but sturdy and decorated with broad stripes of dye and colorful embroidery. Ford studies them, then lets his gaze wander back up to the washers and the gauzy white sheets they’re all wrapped in. If he could listen clearly enough to anything at the moment, it’s possible he’d be able to hear realization tapping insistently at the windows in his brain. “Oh my gosh!” Ford flushes to his ears. “I’m so sorry, I’m new here, I didn’t mean to stare. Should I keep covering my eyes?”

Their laughter makes him flinch, but in a more familiar way than what he’s been dealing with for the last few months. They help him out of the water in a bustle of limbs and friendly chatter, and Ford has to tell himself again that this isn’t real because it can’t be. The sun can’t be this warm and yellow, the river can’t wind so wide and calm along its course. People can’t be glad to see him without baring rows of jagged fangs.

But then one of the washers guides a wad of coarse yet fragrant moss into Ford’s palm and shows him how to scrub the river mud out of his coat, and the weight of the motion is so convincing he’s not sure how even something as powerful as Bill could fake it. So he holds onto that for whatever it’s worth and keeps scrubbing, only trusting himself to look up for seconds at a time to nod or answer a question. His shirt is dry on his back before he starts cautiously asking some of his own. It feels starchy and a little wrong against his skin, but nothing could be stranger than how quickly he remembers everything it means to just sit by the water and _be_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So chaptered works are new to me and I feel pretty awkward about using them for something without a continuous plot line. But I've got a lot of these I can only work on in chunks at a time, and I figured I might as well plant my flag so I have something to come back to. I'll try not to spam!


	2. Chapter 2

The trees in this region of Dimension 11B-5 sprawl in thick tangled groves together, purple bark contrasting richly with the soft yellow fruit they produce that smells like thyme and tastes like mango. They’re beautiful. Ford will strangle to death under the bough of one shortly if he can’t find the words to save himself.

“If you could just try going one at a time,” he pleads. His captors don’t answer, mainly because they’re too busy shouting over each other at once to hear him. There are nine in all, towering shaggy black wolf-insectoid hybrids with matching insignia carved directly into their exoskeletons that point to either formal military or mercenary band—both of which have their pros and cons for Ford’s sake. They’ve been arguing since they found him stupidly napping among the roots some time ago. And while Ford is confident he can guess the subject of the debate, given his bound wrists and the makeshift noose around his neck, he would pay a lot to know which way the majority are leaning right now. “I’m sure we can all work this out civilly.”

They ignore him. Ford searches the faces of the two closest ones bickering in front of him, but compound eyes are harder to read for expression. The one on the left stamps its leg and makes a series of ascending, dissonant clicking noises. The one on the right growls something back. The left one flings a limb out and shoves Ford hard in the shoulder, as if to emphasize a point. Ford delicately regains his balance while his translator implant sputters in his ear. Passing through that last rift must have damaged the circuits, or it can’t register some context-crucial frequency to their language, which is too unlike any of the others he knows to make mutual intelligibility an option. The input works in fits and starts, feeding him a single word or a mangled half phrase at a time between bursts of white noise. He’s completely on his own for output, stuck clumsily parroting the few things that do come through and trying to build a working vocabulary from there. As diplomatic aids go, it’s abysmal.

The translator spits some new clues at him as the alien on the right speaks, and Ford seizes on them, struggling to replicate the sounds he’s just heard with a mouth that wasn’t built for it. “[Pub—publish],” he tries, unsure of his inflection. “And…'to demand'? No, that’s stupid. Demand, uh.” He runs through the options. “Want, call for, require; require might be closest, but then what on earth is…'report,' not ‘publish’! Someone needs to make a report. Is that right? Wait, say that last part again, I didn’t catch it.”

He might as well not have said anything, for all the reaction he’s getting. Ford twists his hands behind his back and balls them into fists, fighting panic alongside his growing headache. “Can you even hear me?” he asks, pointlessly. If they could, they wouldn’t understand. Would any of them try to?

So far the alien standing off to the side holding the other end of the rope is the only one who hasn’t joined in on the dispute. Ford glances its way. It bristles its dorsal spines at him in what could be a warning just as easily as a bored shrug, but makes no comment. While Ford’s head is still turned, someone snaps a word out that the translator renders to him as _Lost._ He takes a sharp breath and looks around, repeating the sounds while they’re still clear in his mind. “[Lost!] Yes, that’s it exactly, I was just passing through, I don’t mean any trouble!” A relieved laugh escapes him. “We’re finally getting somewhere.”

Ford learns two things as nine heads swivel uniformly in his direction. The first is that he can at least mimic their speech semi-understandably, even in the range of octaves he’s confined to. The second, when the pack erupts into even angrier squabbling, is that that was the wrong answer.

If it was hard to follow any one thread in the conversation before it’s practically impossible now, but the translator isolates a few highlights for him: There’s been a war. He may have just inadvertently allied himself with the retreating side. And now he knows exactly who here wants him dead, because they have a fresh new argument that seems to be convincing the others.

Ford crumbles. “No, no no no no no! That’s not what I meant. Let me try again, please, just give me a minute to think!” Gravity here is lower than what he’s used to. Dying could take minutes. But he’ll be effectively dead the second the noose cuts off any chance of explaining himself, so it is imperative that he keep speaking. He says [lost] again, the wrong thing for him to be, then racks his brain for any kind of negation he’s heard so far. Most of it has to be gibberish due to misapplied context or his worthless, untrained tongue butchering pronunciations, but it’s all he has. “[Nothing?] Like that, but the context, um…[Other!] I think someone said un-something before, or was that supposed to be ‘an?’ Oh, God.” He’s going to die like a petty criminal for want of a tourist phrasebook. “Hold on, I know I can figure this out, not yet, not yet.”

The soldier by the rope still has Ford’s upended and half-confiscated supplies strewn in the dirt by its feet. He’s running out of words to try and on the verge of hyperventilating when it twiddles its mandibles strangely, picks his bag up in one of its free arms and starts fishing around in the side pockets. After some exploration it pulls out a bundle of maps and star charts from Ford’s previous travels. Hope claws at his heart. He opens his mouth to explain them, but the alien makes a noise like an angry ocarina at him so he holds his tongue and holds very still. A few of its comrades grumble and it shushes them too.

The alien flips Ford’s maps around to examine while scratching under its own jaw with a small vestigial foreleg. It’s saying something to itself, too low and monotone to make out clearly, but Ford thinks he hears parts of what he was babbling just a minute ago.Then, without warning, all the fur on its head and neck fluffs up and it whistles shrilly before hurling the papers at one of its friends’ faces. It makes a complex and seemingly triumphant declaration as it does so.

 _Stray_ , the translator says. The soldier leans towards Ford and repeats this to him directly, slower and possibly in a more condescending tone. _Stray._ The next sound it makes as a shorter, clipped aside to its companions doesn’t come through at first, and for a terrible second Ford thinks the translator has finally burned out completely. But then it whirrs back to life and a frail computerized voice whispers in his ear: _Not a threat._

He would trip over himself to repeat it, if he had anywhere to fall. “[Not a threat],” he insists. He says it again, more urgently, when they react with curiosity instead of wrath. “And I don’t think I can do that buzzing thing, but…[Stray?] Was that it?” It’s not perfect, but it seems to be close enough. A few of the pack keep clicking and chirping irritably amongst each other like they're not all quite convinced. For the first time, though, Ford thinks he can see what a relaxed posture looks like on them. “Please understand,” he begs them, “Please please please. [Not a threat.]"

For all Ford knows, it means _idiot_ , or it's the sort of harmlessness one would ascribe in passing to a roach flipped on its back. He doesn’t care. It has the power to make people finally listen to him, so he’ll repeat it as often as he needs to. If he lives and they return his belongings, it will be the first entry in the guide he’s going to make even if he has to invent a written language for them from scratch. Ford looks at the blank, unreadable face of his once-again silent savior while the others reach a consensus on his fate and knows it will be closely followed by [thank you.]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, they say learning by immersion is the best way to do it.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's been a while. Awkward! Here's a thing.

“It’s not that I don’t sympathize,” Ford says, wiping the back of a hand across his face. The grime now smeared on him from chin to cheekbone is a monument to sweaty hubris. “But you have to understand this puts me in an uncomfortable position.”

“I _don’t_ understand.” The voice reverberates, mouthless, from the ditch yawning below. Sheets of desiccated yellow dirt break off and collapse inward from the force, but the enormous tangled plant creature embedded at the bottom doesn’t seem to mind as more debris piles around it. A few pebbles bounce as it rattles its frustration again. “You can leave here. I can’t. My progeny would wither in this soil. Will you help me, or not?”

In this heat, it’s doubly hard for Ford to suppress a grimace at the question. He doesn’t back away yet, but he does keep an eye out for structural instability where he’s standing. “You’re…surviving,” he tries, though the layer of sickly fallen leaves blanketing the ground betrays that it’s a half truth at best. “Who’s to say others like you couldn’t do the same?” Maybe they’ll adapt.”

“Adapt! To what? With what?” the plant cries. Vines curl like clenching fists and thrash aimlessly until it whips up a miniature sandstorm around itself in its tantrum. “Nothing has rooted here since the great fires consumed their fill and left. Seeds crack. Shoots spoil. Not even the loathsome shrieking thieves that would pick and tear from me at their whim will abandon the sky for this place any longer. I am all that remains.”

— _Plantrum_ , Ford thinks. Then: _Heatstroke._ He lowers himself gingerly to sit at the crater’s edge and unslings the bag from his shoulders. “You’re probably thinking of birds,” he says. “The shrieking things, I mean. Though it is unlucky for you if they’ve moved on; they’re excellent natural dispersers.”

One of the plant’s few remaining blossoms twists in Ford’s direction, wilted cream on scarlet with corkscrew tendrils dangling from each petal. Some distant parallel cousin of a strophanthus, perhaps? It’s certainly not suited for a desert biome. A tropical forest would be better, or perhaps a carefully maintained greenhouse. There’s some half-buried glass shards down there too, after all. “And what are you?” it asks him.

Ford spins the cap off his canteen. “Just visiting.”

“Look around you, visiting. Know the truth. There is nothing for me here.”

“I noticed that,” Ford says. He also noticed the black scorch marks seared into every rock within a hundred yard radius, and the hunks of shrapnel and crumbling skeletal building frames dotting the landscape for the past several hours of his travels. What he hasn’t seen yet are birds, or mammals, or really any other life form with even a rudimentary sense of self-preservation. Radiation seemed likely at first, or some lingering chemical weapon, but none of the scanning equipment he brought has picked out anything unusual. Atmospherically speaking, there’s no reason why something with the appropriate adaptations couldn’t thrive in the area.

There’s a dead log on the ditch floor, temptingly shaded in the living plant’s shadow. It looks comfortable. Ford takes a sip and stays where he is.

“Do you know how long you’ve been alone? If you don’t mind me asking,” he adds.

“That depends.” The plant heaves a sigh like a thresher’s blow and coils itself into delirious knots. “How long does it take for roots to reach bedrock? To seep into the fractures and secrets it holds and find them wanting still? How long, for hope to blacken and rot on the vine?”

“A while, probably,” Ford allows. “Am I the first you’ve asked for help?”

“The first to come near enough. The first to listen as you have.” Somehow a lack of eyes doesn’t stop the plant from giving Ford a pointed look. “I had hoped you would be the only one needed.”

Ford’s low on water. He weighs the pros and cons of using a little to wash his face, budgets a conservative palmful for the purpose, and immediately regrets it when he goes from merely dirt-coated to mud-caked in a single splash. “That’s unfortunate,” he says, and spits out a mouthful of grit.

He doesn’t mean to be cruel. A living being asking for help is no small matter to ignore, even if it occasionally turns out to crave blood sacrifice or rip up the floorboards, or tells its friends that you have _plenty_ of extra socks and are so generous, you certainly won’t mind if they all borrow one or two or ten without so much as bothering to—Anyway. That’s different. That’s a matter of personal assumed risk. This? This is an entry out of a dimestore paperback anthology with ASTONISHING ADVENTURES scrawled across the cover in blocky futuristic font. The kind that starts carelessly and ends in exponential organic infection, in assimilation and, for instance, in people firebombing entire cities to nothingness in a desperate final effort to contain a remorseless and all-consuming threat. Often there’s an overambitious scientist at the center of it. Ford’s never cared for that device much.

He puts the canteen away and gives a wary look below. “Your…progeny, you called them,” he says, drumming his heels a little on the ditch wall. He stops himself for fear of triggering a landslide. “If I were to find someplace else for them—if that’s even possible! What would they, uh, do there?”

“Such questions!” The plant stretches upward, still short of reaching Ford, and flares its petals at him in apparent annoyance. “What would they do? Grow. Bloom. What else? If the soil will have them, they will be as they are meant to, and I may perish with my own work fulfilled.”

“But what does that mean?” Ford presses. “What kind of impact will it have?”

A vine lashes out in the dirt again. “Tell me, then: what is your impact?”

Ford scowls. “That’s irrelevant.”

“Yet you would demand to know mine. Why?”

“Because I think you’re dangerous!” Ford throws his hands up. “Or a hallucination, or maybe a high-concept metaphor for Communism? I don’t know. It’s been a long day for me. And I.” _I can’t leave another world less safe than I found it._ “And I suppose whatever I have to do with that isn’t so irrelevant,” he finishes, wishing he could turn himself in knots too. He settles for folding angrily over his knees with arms crossed. “At least not to me.”

The plant twists in languid silence for some time at the edge of Ford’s sight. Then: “Diaspore,” it calls him. “Breeze-borne, rootless thing. Flit away if it suits you, but I can be no other than this. Shall I wish myself unsown for your comfort?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Nobody said that.” Ford glares at the horizon. A group of hills in the distance wave glumly back at him, the only landmark for miles. He hoped things might look better upwind of the epicenter, maybe even with a town or a radio tower still standing to offer some hope. But from here the path ahead is just as ugly and barren as everything else. “If you must know,” he says, without looking down, “I’m starting to think there’s nothing else out there at all. It might not even make a difference what either of us does anymore.”

“…Then you have reconsidered?” the plant says. A little too nonchalantly, part of Ford thinks. “You will help me? Or seek to?”

Ford’s left hand drums a staccato rhythm across his right elbow as he keeps squinting irritably at the hills. “Well,” he starts.

“My gratitude would long survive us both. The very wind and rock would whisper of your deeds.”

“Hm.”

“You will have to come closer,” the plant says, so imploringly. “Just enough so I can reach you.” Ford taps a little faster.

-

He finds life in the valley after all, when he finally reaches it. Teal scrub brush, mercifully insentient, interspersed with patches of some velvety succulent that looks promisingly edible. There’s even water. Only the barest winding trickle of a stream, true, but it’s enough to sustain a few skimming beetles and the tiny translucent fish feeding on them in turn. Privately, cautiously, he’s starting to let himself feel this world might not be the lost cause he’d braced himself for.

“Wheeeeeeeeeee!”

He does wish the spores wouldn’t talk, though.

“Thank you, pollinator!” one cluster cry out in unison as they detach from his coat and waft upward, a hideous cloud of fuzzy orange flecks against the still-sweltering sky.

“Yes, yes, fine,” Ford answers, climbing over a rock. “Please don’t call me that.”

Another clump falls away from his boot to scatter in the grass when he lands. “Pollinator, we are grateful to you always!”

“Okay.”

They’re tenacious, he’ll give them that. He thought most of them would fall off on the plains in the first hour, and to be fair many did. But he’s still practically coated to the waist, thanks to some fascinating megafloral adaptations he would rather never have to think about again in detail because all that would probably come to mind is _Oh god, they were everywhere_. Instead he focuses on brushing against whatever he can find to dislodge them. A shrub here, a dead tree there, not too close to the water but roughly in range of it. It’s all trial and error, really. He even wanders partway up some of the hillsides to broaden the range a little, for biodiversity’s sake.

“Remember, you all have to get off somewhere!” Ford tells his passengers brightly. “I’m burning everything I own as soon as I find civilization again.”

“Yes, of course!” the spores answer, a thousand tiny new voices chirping over each other delightedly. “We won’t forget!” some of them reassure him, while others exalt, “This place is perfect! How cool the air! How soft the land! How kind the one who brought us here!”

Ford attempts to shoo a clump off his shoulder but ends up with a handful of clinging orange mess instead. At least it’s only about half as revolting as he expected. “It is an improvement, isn’t it?” he says, looking around for something to smear them on.

“Immeasurably! Whoever among us survives will keep your memory always.”

“Okay,” Ford says again, before blowing them from his palm.

“Be good,” he hopes.

 

 

 


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> #4 comes with a vulgar language warning and my sincerest apologies.

Some years ago, this often being the case at the time, Ford might have told himself he was imagining the wary whispers and doubtful glances aimed his way. Might have found something egotistical in the assumption, even. But the portal hub security line advances inch by inch, allowing plenty of observation time to reach two conclusions: people are definitely looking at him, and he is definitely never coming back here, if he makes it out at all. Have the wanted posters made it here too? Has he been a target from the moment he arrived? The architecture isn’t obviously molded with triangle motifs, but it must take a while in any fallen dimension before the signs of conquest have time to fully settle in. He tugs his scarf tighter around his face and keeps moving, shoving his gloved hands in his pockets just in case. So far nobody has approached him directly, but the careful radius they leave around him doesn’t lend much confidence either.

Just keep walking. Just get out. That’s all there ever is to it.

He reaches the checkpoint unconfronted with both eyes firmly on the tile. An armed security officer, perhaps sensing the treacherous twinge of hope in his chest, stalks over and gestures for him to halt. “You! Hold it.”

Ford keeps looking down. “I have my ticket here,” he says lowly, holding it out.

“Didn’t ask for your ticket. Let me see your face.” The officer shoots a claw out for Ford’s scarf before he can dodge or protest, wrenching the fabric down. He recoils at the sight. Someone else in line shrieks. “Damn,” he hisses, then fumbles for the radio on his collar. “Phillips, get down to A-Gate pronto, I think we’ve got a human. Yeah, I’m serious. No sudden moves!” he snaps, leveling his rifle at Ford’s chest. “You’re not going anywhere, you—“

“Ohhhhhh my god, are you kidding me?” a voice barks out from the back of the line. Ford thought his shoulders couldn’t get any tenser, but they find unrealized potential inside themselves and manage it anyway. “I can’t believe this, what kind of blind idiot would even—“ There’s a hurried rustling noise, as of bodies being pushed aside, and then someone snatches Ford’s wrist and rips the glove off his hand in one swift irritable motion, holding it out with the fingers splayed. “Yeah hey, gee, get a load of that, uh, _Keith_.” Ford winces when the stranger cranes over his shoulder to read the officer’s name tag—more from the acrid sting of bourbon vapor than the weight. “That look like any human hand you’ve ever seen? I don’t know, it’s probably been a couple weeks since they taught you how to count to ten at the academy, right? Son of a bitch, you’d think this guy’s never seen an albino Kremorlian before. Am I right, folks?” The stranger uses his still-iron grip to twirl Ford around and waves his exposed hand mockingly at the other travelers in line.

There’s chatter in the crowd, but it’s doubtful. The stranger steps on Ford’s foot. Hating him, hating himself, hating everything, Ford twiddles his fingers nonthreateningly. “Hello, everyone! I’m sorry if I worried you. It’s…well, it’s a personal matter.” He smiles, or pulls off something close to it, and it’s as if someone has let the pressure out of a balloon. A few people smile back. Some nudge each other or, in the manner of suggestible crowds everywhere, pretend they weren’t paying attention in the first place.

Even the officer seems to sense the shift in mood. He shuffles sullenly on his feet, but lowers his weapon halfway. “Well, he _looked_ like a human.”

“Hooooooooly shit, okay, wow!” The stranger finally releases Ford and throws his own flailing arms in the air. “I see how it is. Can’t be too careful, right? Can’t just set aside a little common fuckin’ empathy for a guy with a hideous painful skin condition. They get all their nutrients from their sun, Keith,” he says gravely. “Think about what a walk in the park _that’s_ gotta be.”

One of the other passengers in line raises a tentacle to her mouth in sympathy. “Oh, is it that bad?”

“Excruciating,” Ford assures her, massaging his wrist. Another wave of sheepish murmurs passes through the crowd.

“See?” The stranger says, gesturing wildly. “You wanna see his gills too, Keith? Want him to just—just whip ‘em out right here in front of everyone? There’s kids in line! You’re a sick guy, Keith, you know that?”

He’s been steadily raising his voice throughout the confrontation, and now the officer makes frantic motions to shush him. “Okay, okay, you can go through, just keep it down!” He turns to Ford, mandibles working anxiously. “Here’s your ticket back, man, I’m really sorry. I hope you have a good trip.”

“Yeah, I thought so,” the stranger says, snapping it out of the air before Ford can reach it himself. “And you know what, you know, I just wanna say, this could have been a really dark day for free organisms everywhere.” He loops his arm through Ford’s and starts pulling him away through the checkpoint. Nobody seems to notice his own lack of a ticket, or the row of suspicious vials with biohazard labels on his belt, or the frankly insultingly obvious price tag on the prosthetic third eye slapped in the middle of his forehead. Of course they don’t notice. It’s not even centered properly. Ford seethes. “This is what happens, people!” the stranger calls over his shoulder. “’S’what happens when you let the fear win.”

They cross the terminal together, still arm in arm, silent apart from the jaunty tune the stranger keeps intermittently whistling under his breath. Ford’s scowl etches deeper with every smug bar of it. “See,” he suddenly pipes up after a minute of this. “The trick is to know how to talk to people.”

“You look ridiculous.” Ford barely smothers the urge to scream it in time. “And nobody asked you. And shouldn’t you be in prison after that stunt on Cronus, anyway?”

“Oh whoa, heeeeey, so it _is_ you!” The Stranger turns his full attention on Ford, looking genuinely delighted. “How about that! Y’know, the first five or six times I figured it had to be parallel versions of the same idiot running around everywhere with big neon ‘kill me’ signs strapped to their backs, but it’s really just been you out there, huh? You’re like a—like a multiversal singularity of shit decisions. Pretty impressive.”

“I’ve run into other me’s,” Ford mutters.

“Yeah? Bet that ended in a beatdown.”

If he had to, Ford could break himself free and walk away. It’s not a man gripping his arm so much as an assemblage of elbows strung together with chicken wire and contempt, so he’s pretty sure he could manage. (Ford’s made a conscious effort not to learn his name. He suspects the Stranger knows his by now, but pretends not to, because he is a petty insufferable wretch.) The last thing he needs is to draw more attention to himself, though, so he straightens his spine and pretends to be deeply interested in the duty-free shops and souvenir kiosks they’re passing. “I’ve never once asked for your help,” he reminds the Stranger tersely, glaring holes through a rack of postcards. “And I don’t plan on it, because as far as I can tell, the only common hazard in our encounters has been you.”

“Yeah, yeah, chickens and eggs, whatever helps you sleep at night.” The Stranger idly lifts a flask and a handful of mixed candies out of Ford’s coat pocket. Upon examination, he lobs the pear-flavored one back in. “For what it’s worth, you’ve got the right idea skipping town. This is one of the ones where we figured out spaceflight first and killed, uh, everything. Not exactly a great party spot for humans, but the music scene’s got its highlights. So!” He clicks his heels together smartly as they draw up to a vacant portal. “What’s next on the fuckup tour?”

Ford unclenches his jaw with a heroic effort. “I thought I’d try Sixty-Five Ampersand End Bracket,” he says.

The Stranger gives Ford a scandalized look before whipping out his stolen ticket to examine it. His eyebrows shoot into his hairline. “Jesus Chr—seriously? Listen, buddy, I know a guy who’ll buy your organs right now if you’re in that much of a rush to get rid of ‘em. Okay, no, come on.” He shoves Ford up the steps onto the loading dais, feeds the ticket into the control pad, then crouches to unscrew an important-looking panel and toss it aside.

“What are you doing?” Ford hisses. He can already see a commotion brewing back at the security line, where it would seem someone has finally put two and two together.

“It says ‘self-serve’ right on the signs, narc, I’m just making that actually mean something.” The Stranger roots around in some wires as if they’ve personally offended him, and Ford watches the destination coordinates on display overhead start to change. “Here’s the deal,” he says as he works, apparently oblivious to the turning heads and distant shouting around them. “You’re going to Dollar Sign Dollar Sign 2XJ. When you get out, there’s a beach right across from the station. Follow the boardwalk for like two miles, go to this little massage place with a bunch of blue lights and wind chimes and touristy junk by the entrance, and ask for Mel. He’s a magician, I’m serious, you’re gonna forget you have bones. That’s Mel with six eyes, got it?” he says, standing up to punch in the final ignition sequence. “Old three-eyed Mel can be a real asshole.”

He drapes himself indolently over the control pad as the machinery hums in preparation. A group of guards is now definitely headed their way behind him. “And hey, not that I care or you’ll pay attention enough for this to matter, but I’ll tell you right now anyway: You should quit while you’re ahead and find someplace you can live with. Or hell, mix it up a little! There’s better stuff out there anyway. It’s Spring Blork. Go fingerbang some gelatinous coeds, or whatever you’re into. But believe me, no Earth is worth this shit. ”

The portal flickers to life from the ground up, dousing Ford’s ankles in static. He puts his hands back in his pockets and realizes too late he’s still missing a glove. “That’s a terrible name for a holiday,” he says. “Six on your left, by the way.”

The Stranger snaps off a lazy salute and slips from view so quickly he might not have been there to begin with. Ford sees pulses of laser rifle fire and hears raucous laughter and a cry of _Ohhh shit, what now, motherfuckers?_ But before he can decide if it’s worth it to step off the panel and intervene, thick green light washes over him and takes the choice from his hands.

 

 


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Slight blood/injury warning this chapter, for those averse to such things.

Setting aside the part where it crashed into some mountains and erupted in a fiery hellblaze five hundred years ago, the Belxarian warship is a triumph of engineering. It’s rusting, but not half as much as it logically should be. Whoever installed the overhead lights paid such attention to backup wiring and impact shielding that several decks are still completely navigable without a flashlight. The generator feeding the atmospheric controls alone must have dozens of failsafes in place to keep it plugging away after long exposure to Arctic weather. It’s actually bordering on uncomfortably warm in some of the aftward sectors. From everything Ford heard about them in the job briefing, the Belxarians would no doubt take some pride in their capacity to inconvenience intruders from beyond the grave.

They might especially like to know their security system has held up so well.

“I said duck!” he yells, doing his best to run but settling for a vigorous lurch with the extra weight he’s dragging. The spidery alarm droids scuttling up the hall in pursuit are not so encumbered and keep closing the gap, each of them sounding an ear-splitting tone meant to summon long-dead soldiers to investigate. ”Didn’t I say to duck before we opened that vault? I was so sure I heard myself say that.”

Uda screams incoherently in response and twists around with the arm she doesn’t have slung across Ford’s shoulders to fire a rifle blast into the swarm. “Gonna kill you!” she promises, over explosive echoes and the crunch of mangled metal limbs. “Soon as I’m done not dying here, you ’n’ me are having a real long chat about this job!” She gets one more solid shot in, followed by two in quick succession that don’t sound like they hit anything but ship, before her strength flags and the gun slips from her claws with a hollow clang. They leave the surviving droids flailing in confusion behind a wall of debris. Apart, that is, from the one clamped in Uda’s side, which if possible raises its volume in protest. Uda hisses and grabs at her ribs in an attempt to smother it. “And will you let me smash this stupid thing already?”

“No!” Ford nearly slips on the smooth chrome floor and slaps a hand against the wall to keep from toppling. There’ll be no getting back up again if he does. “You tried ripping it out and we found out it had hooks. At least wait until I can find a—“

Uda is already opening her mouth to argue with or possibly decapitate him, but an entirely new noise makes them both stop and look up in time to watch something small and fizzling arc overhead. It passes in front of them, trailing smoke and dainty sparks, and Ford’s brain is just shaping itself around the word  _ rocket _ when it collides with a ceiling joist down the hall. Metal shavings and a shower of crackling blue lights fall from the impact site. Somewhere behind them, the droid that lobbed the flare beeps triumphantly. And that should be the extent of it, from a ballistics standpoint. The warship has other plans. The warship instead shudders, pauses to weigh its options, and, as though at long last bored of being such a paragon to all other wrecks, gives a colossal sigh before the entire section they’re standing in tears away and collapses forward into the mountain chasm below.

Consider this physics riddle. A human, an injured eight foot lizard person (excluding tail length), and a parasitic ancient alien burglar alarm start descending a half mile stretch of ship at an approximate thirty degree angle. Assuming minimal friction and a combined weight of five hundred pounds, how many layers of hull will they punch through when they all fall screaming through to the bottom of the abyss? Ford is trying to remember how much force it takes to powder bone when a ghost of a thought drifts lazily up from the depths of recollection.

_ Sideways going downhill, like a goat. And if you’re going to fall, fall backwards, so’s you land on your rear and not your face. _

Without thinking, Ford grits his teeth and turns his heels. It’s better advice for a coarse mountain trail than a shiny futuristic corridor, but his boot treads offer some resistance, and that buys him time to search the hall flying past them for something useful. A sign jutting out above a side room ahead catches his eye, glowing enticingly out of the darkness. The exact configuration of dots and diamonds might not mean anything to Ford, but they’re the same blue as the emergency flare and clearly meant as a recognizable symbol to anyone coming through this part of the ship. It has to be the medbay. Or possibly the mess hall. Either way, it means tools and something to sop up the blood. He gauges the timing as best as he can under his breath before yelling, “Hard left!”

Uda doesn’t steer so much as give up trying to stay upright. The sudden lopsided weight yanks them both to one side and sends her through the door like a battering ram. Her momentum slingshots Ford into the middle of the room, where he pummels a raised exam table in the same way wet paper pummels an oak tree, and then she sinks down the tilted floor and lies curled in a boneless heap against the wall.

“Good thinking,” Ford wheezes. He dislodges the table from his solar plexus on the third try and starts clambering over it. “You stay there. I’ll be right back.”

Uda’s tail thrashes. “Hate you. Hate this. Hate everything.”

“That’s the spirit!” Ford hauls himself up to a counter and starts opening supply cabinets. A basket of wide spongy gauze strips slides out of one and nearly hits his face. He grabs it, dumps half the contents, and tucks it under his arm so he can fill the rest with a mishmash of other medicines and gizmos. “I think the ship’s stopped falling. Try radioing the crew to come find us.”

There’s a click from below, then a sputtering noise, then the halfhearted flicking of a dial being repeatedly turned on and off again. “Nothing,” Uda reports. “There’s probably interference, on account of there’s a screaming robot in me.”

“That’s fine, it’s fine, it’s fine.” Ford tries a cleansing agent at the sink, quickly discovers it’s made for someone with a hardier skin pH, and spends as much time frantically scrubbing off the residue as he would on washing under ideal circumstances. “Do you have any allergies I should know about?” he calls over his shoulder.

Uda groans. “Not unless you’re planning to rub peanut oil on my wounds. Wait.” Her claws scrabble on the floor. “I don’t know my bile type. Is that gonna be a problem?”

“I can’t see how!” Ford says truthfully. He pushes off from the counter and slides down to her. Uda’s head lolls curiously toward the basket under his arm. Her nostrils flare at the jumbled mess inside. “Don’t worry about it,” Ford says. He tugs gently yet insistently at the arm she’s still pressing to her torso. “I have to see.”

Up close and unmuffled, the droid siren has a nasty pulsing quality, which doesn’t help Ford’s turning stomach when he inspects the damage. The thing’s spidery legs are all hidden, buried under Uda’s shredded vest and skin. At least one appendage has actually tangled itself between the ribs, judging by the pattern of bruises turning her usual green an unhealthy shade of taupe. That leaves only the smooth disc of its body visible on the surface, like an extremely ill-tempered frisbee flashing warning lights as it digs itself in deeper. “Okay,” Ford says, exhaling. “It’s…really in there.”

“Great job. Cut it out.”

Ford hesitates. That would be the quickest way. They’re completely isolated and half the equipment in here could be toxic to one or both of them, and he hasn’t sutured scales since...what, ‘81? Dimension X-14? That chimera probably didn’t count; only the lion part of it needed surgery. But he could do it if he had to. The organ arrangement can’t be that different, surely. Surely.

Memory takes another jab at him.  _ Oh, buddy. You have no earthly idea what you’re looking at, do you. _

Ford shakes his head. “It’ll be easier to disarm it first,” he decides, picking out the most delicate tools he can find in his basket. “Maybe I can shut it off or trigger a release mechanism.”

“You’re joking. This is how humans joke.”

“Hush.” He says it to both her and the droid, which whistles in protest as Ford unscrews its top panel with a scalpel. The gears inside loom complexly at him, but at least they’re laid out with some order. Ford listens for Uda’s breathing as he works. “It’s actually not that complicated,” he tries to assure her, when he thinks he hears it shallow. “I had a friend once who showed me how to troubleshoot things like this.”

“‘Had.’”

“We drifted, later. This was before.” Ford nudges a cluster of wires to one side to get at the circuit board beneath. “It was on a wreck, a little like this one. We set off an airlock and got separated on opposite sides, and of course the controls were all on mine. Completely unfamiliar tech for the both of us.” There was a similar amount of yelling, too, if Ford remembers correctly. He smiles a little. “Imagine trying to hold a reverse engineering lesson through a soundproof door.”

With her broad head wedged in the corner as it is, Uda can only fix a single eye on Ford at a time. The one facing him now contracts its pupil to a mistrustful sliver. “So you’re bad at machines, too.”

“I’ve had to learn quickly,” Ford corrects, reaching for a laser cutter. “And this one’s not too different in principle. See, if I just break the connection here and rewire the whatsit from the thingamajig, we should be able to bypass the--”

TAMPER ALERT.

The panel almost severs Ford’s thumb when it snaps itself shut. It should be a relief after so long for the alarm to finally choke into silence, but neither of them gets any time to appreciate it, because deep inside the droid something new begins to rev in its place, low and sullen but accelerating quickly. Uda squirms. “What was that? What did you do?”

“Don’t panic,” Ford says, grappling with the panel in the hopes of forcing it open again. It won’t budge. 

TAMPER ALERT. TAMPER ALERT. INITIATING LEVEL III NEUTRALIZATION MEASURES.

“Ford, it’s initializing measures. Measures, Ford!”

“I heard. Don’t panic!”

A spark lances across Uda’s side, making her jolt painfully. She beats her clenched fist on the ground. “Just cut it out. I don’t care, you can fix me later!”

Ford buries both hands in his hair. “I could kill you!”

Uda yanks him so hard by his collar that part of it rips at the seam. “You said you’d run salvage drops before when we picked you up. What kind of idiot captain hires a doctor for that who won’t do his job?”

TAMPER ALERT, the droid adds, revving faster. BUFFERING.

“That was a small crew!” Ford yells, matching it in volume despite himself. “More of a private enterprise, really. I’ve never operated on reptilians before!”

“We’re half the population!”

“I have a funny story about that!”

NEUTRALIZATION MEASURES ACTIVATING.

The droid makes the decision for them when it hauls itself out of Uda vertically, like a ghastly robotic king crab emerging from the sand bed of her flesh. It towers over them both, dripping violet, a charging whirring nightmare made of legs and semi-autonomous wrath. On instinct, Ford grabs the leg part.

His first swing does more damage to the wall than anything else. The second puts a dent in the droid’s shell and crumples something in its speaker enough to turn its furious shrieking into a sad tinny whine. By the third, fifth, seventh and ninth Ford’s pretty sure the weapons system is toast, but that doesn't matter anymore. All he wants now is to keep hitting this stupid perfect marvel of technology until its stupid perfect guts are in piles all over the stupid perfect floor.

He stops only when he's panting for breath and the legs in his hand hang limp as a bundle of snapped radio antennae. Meanwhile, Uda has propped herself up against the wall and is pawing laboriously through the supply basket. Ford reaches for her, but she smacks his hand away. He slides down the wall next to her instead and meekly helps her sort.

They find an antiseptic that doesn't corrode on application, and a few sheets of some quick-fusing transparent skin substitute that Uda snatches from him and slaps over the worst of her wounds. It's a patch job at best, and unlikely to stave off infection in the long run. But judging from the speed of its exit and the graveyard of parts around them, Ford thinks the droid might have done them a favor and removed its whole self cleanly. It's likely more than he could have managed.

The whole time they're working, Uda refuses to acknowledge him. This too is familiar.

“Well,” he tries, sitting back and adjusting his glasses. He holds the droid corpse up at arm’s length to examine it. “Reckon it's neutralized.”

Uda grunts. “What does that mean? And what’s a thingamajig? And what’s  _ wrong _ with you?”

“I’m an alien,” Ford says, exhausted. He drops his arm to the ground with a clank. “That is, moreso. In an interdimensional sense, not just an interplanetary one.” He wiggles one of the droid’s less broken legs back and forth to test the articulation. “There’s other dimensions, by the way. Sorry.”

An urgent crackling noise interrupts, making them both jump. Ford raises the droid like a bat. Uda flings the radio out of her belt, juggles it frantically, and almost crushes it in her hands when she goes to respond. “What?” She snaps into it. “Yeah, we’re both here. Tripped some alarms and fell down a hole, but I think it’s settled now. Can you get a read on our position? Great, we’ll stay put.” She settles back a little as the adrenaline wears off. “Nah. Fuel rods are in the dolly back at the drop point. We left it there when we loaded it up. You can’t miss it, long as there wasn’t an avalanche.” Faint mumbling noises drift from the receiver. Uda growls. “Because there was a whole ship left to look at, okay? I’m not arguing about this now. Just hurry and get us out already. Huh?” Uda turns Ford's way while she listens to some more mumbling. She holds eye contact with him for a long moment. “Ask me again later,” she decides, still holding it. “Yeah yeah, over.” She hangs up and shoves the radio back in her belt. When she turns back, she laces her claws gently over her abdomen, mindful of her injured side, and stares blankly at the far end of the room slanted above. “So. Dimensions.”

“I try not to lead with that part,” Ford says miserably. “It tends to complicates things. But the point is we don’t have people like you in mine. I mean. We sort of do. They’re just smaller and don’t talk or have access to advanced forms of spaceflight.” Ford boxes his hands around an invisible lizard. “Or maybe the ones who do are just good at hiding? I’ve heard theories.”

“All humans,” Uda muses, nodding with a kind of philosophical horror. “And no ships?”

“We did get to the moon before I left,” Ford says. “It was a pretty big deal for us.”

“Sounds boring.”

“Maybe a little. I should have mentioned sooner.”

“You really, really should have.”

Ford sinks further down the wall. “You can dump me somewhere when we get out if you like. I think I’m…” How did it go, again?  _ A screen door on a submarine?  _ “...Bad at being useful,” he finishes.

“Yes,” Uda agrees. “So get better.” She raises an arm sharply and gives a warning chitter to cut Ford off before he can speak. “Shut up. Give me a few days, and your cut of this job, and learn doctoring. Then we'll talk. Maybe.”

“Okay,” Ford says. He decides to get started on leaving her alone then, and bites his tongue to wait for the crew. To his surprise, she breaks the silence first.

“Bashed that thing pretty good, though,” she says, tersely, with a nod at the carnage around them. It is the highest praise she has ever given him.

“Oh. Yes.” Ford looks at his hand still wrapped around the droid. He unclenches it with difficulty. “I got you, buddy.”


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Heavy food content with a side of cannibalism talk this chapter. I hope I'm catching most of these warnings as they crop up, because they're getting a little out there.

After six pickups in a row and the long stretches between camped in a windowless cargo hold, Ford should jump at the chance to breathe fresh air and walk on solid ground for more than a few minutes. It’s hard to muster much enthusiasm for this waystation in the middle of its winter, though, with bitter damp cutting through his layers and everything from dock platform to sky smeared the same muddy gray. That, and his legs are unused to the effort. He tries to stamp some feeling back into them while the foreman runs a final check on his cart.

“Sloppy,” the foreman declares, shoving a crate further in halfway up the pile. “Don’t know what they teach you lumps on loading duty these days.” A burst of fog clouds his exosuit visor as he huffs his annoyance behind it. He shoves the datapad he’s holding into Ford’s chest anyway. “Here’s the list. You know the drill by now: no stepping inside another ship, and signatures for any weapons above a Class D. And here’s your pay for after.”

Ford catches the bag the foreman throws from his belt and hefts it in one hand. “That’s not what we agreed on.”

“That’s half,” the foreman says. “You get the rest back at HQ when the season’s done. And don’t mess around too long. We miss the launch window for orbit transfer to the next stop and our whole schedule’s wrecked.”

It’s not worth arguing. Ford pockets the bag and nods assent, which the foreman takes as his cue to scuttle back to the warmth of the ship. Talpinians don’t complain about isolation or enclosed spaces, but they tolerate the cold even less well than humans. Judging by how it whines when Ford activates the hover mechanism, the cart has its objections too. He ignores the steering platform in back and walks alongside it instead, ankle-deep in slush but slowly relearning mobility, and only occasionally reaching out to nudge it back on course or adjust a failing strap.

Most of his deliveries are for the market beyond the docks, where things get a bit livelier. He weaves between other workers and harried travelers on his route, ticking items off one by one on the datapad as he unloads them. A few people have questions or complaints, but most just give brief thanks or ignore him altogether. Ford takes the opportunity this gives him to browse what the market has to offer in case there’s anything worth getting for himself after all. One of the stalls has real paper, made from actual plant fiber. Tempting, but the merchant gives Ford a suspicious look for running his hands over the pages, so he quickly hands off the box of display placards he’s here for and slips away. Maybe if he comes back later someone else will be on shift.

Slowly but surely the cart empties, until he has only a handful of packages left that take him into a square full of food vendors. A crate of glassware goes to a restaurant with teeming tanks of bioluminescent eels arranged by the front door. He unloads two drums of oil for a frail old crane woman, filling pouches of puffy fried dough with nutty paste at a stand with a line twisting halfway down the street. A small and gently thrumming parcel goes to a cheesemaker, who refuses to acknowledge Ford until he goes around to the back of the stall and then shuts the door in his face without a word.

By the time he’s finished it has fully dawned on Ford how hard he’s worked and how long it’s been since he last had a meal that didn’t come from a tube. Talpinians, lacking tastebuds, seem likewise uninterested in things like variety or imagination. He tried explaining the concept once, before he got to ‘bitter’ and the entire crew laughed at the absurd notion of a species unable to identify toxic components without recklessly putting their mouths on the questionable object anyway. After that it was easier to shut up and eat his healthful nutritive pulp with the rest of them.

Resolved, he programs return coordinates into the hovercart and lets it escort itself back to the shuttle so he can wander around more freely. He’s spoiled for choice, but a few options he can eliminate for one reason or another. Too crowded. Too expensive. Too alight with unspeakable black flame and spiced with the screams of the damned. Shredded coconut. With every lap, he keeps finding himself strangely drawn to a nondescript tent at the far end of a row, until at last curiosity and hunger win out. Ford approaches the tent and pulls the flap aside to find it empty except for a single chef darting around in the back, who raises one of six arms cradling a stack of cast iron pots to wave him over. “Hi, we’re open, come on in!”

The counter is rustic but clean. Ford takes a seat at it and deposits a handful of coins on the wooden top before burying his head in his arms. “Something hot, please. Whatever this will get me.”

The chef starts to say something as he approaches, but stops mid stride. When he speaks again he sounds incredulous. “Really?”

Ford glances up. He squints at the money on the counter. It would be his luck if they’re paying him in the wrong currency for this place. He fishes around in his vest and produces a few chips and wadded bills from previous travels, which he drops in a sad heap with the rest of the money. “One of those should be right.”

The chef stays quiet a little longer, then, either taking pity or spotting a better deal, takes a few pieces from the pile and shuffles back towards the kitchen. Ford hears distant clattering, then the gentle thunk of a cutting board hitting the counter and a frenzy of chopping. He looks up when something is shoved his way to find a bowl of steaming reddish stew before him, filled with strips of meat and a large soft grain and topped generously with fresh herbs. The familiarity strikes him in a way he didn’t expect.

The first bite also strikes him, given that his tongue hasn’t run across anything more interesting than tasteless mush for the last several months. At first it’s more overwhelming than anything else, and he has to chew carefully to keep from making a scene.

“How is it?” The chef asks delicately, sweeping bits of stem into one webbed hand for disposal while three more clean the rest of the workstation. A few pale scars on his gunmetal gray skin suggest the multitasking was a hard earned skill.

Ford wishes he could explain in a positive way how it feels like his mouth is dying. “Fine, thank you.”

“Oh, great!” The chef busies himself for a while and lets Ford eat in peace. Then, feigning casualness: “Are you sure?”

The downside of being the only patron is that it makes you the only person to focus on. Ford tries to mask his irritation at the scrutiny. “Yes, I’m sure, there's no need to…” He stops. There’s a slight perpetually bewildered air to those wide pale eyes, but something about the look he’s giving Ford suggests a more specific kind of curiosity. “It's human, isn't it,” Ford doesn’t ask, drumming the fingers of his free hand. “I'm eating human.”

“It's actually not!” the chef says, dropping everything to lean over the counter. “It's Ganymede boar with seahen marrow stock and a house spice blend I've been working on.” He flicks out a notepad from his apron pocket and a pen from behind his ear. In his excitement, the lisp through his overlapping rows of needle teeth grows more pronounced. “But was it convincing? I’d love to hear any feedback if you have some time.”

“Not my area of expertise, I’m afraid,” Ford says, tilting his spoon and watching the broth dribble back into the bowl. “I just assumed from all the staring. Is is cheaper to fake it?”

The chef whistles. “You’ve been out in the black for a while, huh? The Livestock and Agriculture Board added humans to the no-trade list a few phases back. Voted to sneak you guys in under the minimum sentience clause or something. So, hey!” Three of his hands shoot a congratulatory gesture Ford’s way. “That’s good, right?”

Ford blinks. “I suppose it is.”

“Not that I was a big fan before or anything,” the chef assures Ford hurriedly. “I mean, I stopped ordering it years ago. My neighbors across the hall when I first moved here had a human, and I just couldn’t think about them the same after that. They’re really, really smart! Like, up there with a toddler or a squid, even.”

“That’s very progressive of you,” Ford says. He finds himself taking another bite. “So you’re out a useful ingredient now.”

“Two, actually. They added those crab people from Argys-5 in the same bill. Did you know they can do long division?”

“I didn’t!”

The chef raps his pen against his notepad. “But everybody’s gotta eat, and most of the other options out there so far are pretty bland. So I’m trying to find a substitute that doesn’t make people feel like they’re getting cheated, you know? Like you don’t just want to settle for a bunch of boring lab-spun protein when you’re really craving a nice, juicy...uh. No offense,” he says. Ford waves the apology away. “The trouble is I can never get the flavors quite right. That’s probably the closest I’ve gotten, and it’s not _bad_ , but.” He slumps a little lower on the counter and eyes the row of empty seats in disappointment. “Something’s still missing.”

Ford pokes thoughtfully at the grains in his stew. Pozole, he suddenly thinks. That’s what it reminds him of. He read speculation that the Aztecs didn’t always use pork for it, when he last spent time brushing up on that culture for his research. The anecdote had been particularly amusing to…Regardless. “You said Ganymede. The moon, the planet, or the drifting malevolent starbase AI?”

“Second one.”

Ford pulls out his datapad and spends a few seconds breaking through the company content filters to look it up. He skips tour guides and history papers before finding a research article about its biosphere and geological composition. “I wonder if it’s the iron,” he says, scrolling down the list. “We don’t contain huge amounts of it, but that looks like a pretty low ratio for the fauna there. You might have better luck sourcing ingredients from someplace already supporting a human colony. We are what we eat, as they say.” He takes another bite. It’s really a very nice stew. “Or, hm. Are most of your customers obligate carnivores?”

“I try to keep it omni,” the chef says, with a small disdainful noise. “You go too far down the specialty menu hole and there’s no way to dig yourself out.”

“Well, there’s a spinach on Liithros that mimics a biochemical terror response when damaged to keep the empathic wildlife from eating it. Very stressful to accidentally step on a bunch, even if you don’t have a sixth sense.” Ford turns the data pad around to show him a produce guide. “I’m not sure if you’d retain the effect when cooking it, but it might add some dimension to things.”

The chef picks up the data pad and scans it quickly, deep in thought. “I could use it as a wrap,” he realizes. “It could work.”

“Portable, even!” Ford lifts his spoon encouragingly. “That’s innovative.”

It must be painful to bite one’s lip with a mouth like that, but the chef does it anyway. He makes up his mind and takes a deep breath. “Okay, you can tell me to shut up and I’ll leave you alone, I totally understand. But if you don’t mind, can I run a few things by you while you’re here? I’ve got lots of ideas and literally no one has ever been this interested before.”

As he says it, Ford realizes just how much he means it. “I’d love that.”

 

-

 

By the time the foreman tracks him down they have half a menu plan scrawled on the blackboard and the sky outside is dark as pitch. Ford is too busy squeezing purple fruit over a plate of chopped shellfish to notice when he first storms into the tent.

“So the citric acid in the juice cures the meat as it marinates and does the cooking for you without any heat,” he explains, catching a few errant seeds in his other hand as they fall. “But if they wanted to, and if you garnished the rest of the dish accordingly to account for different chemical reactions, someone who normally spits acid at their prey could just--”

“That’s so good. This is so good.” The chef nods and scribbles furiously. “You’re a genius.”

“Nonsense! I never would have thought of it if you hadn’t mentioned that pickling technique for the--”

“Hey!” They both stop to look at the foreman, absolutely livid on the other side of the counter. “What are you doing? You were supposed to be onboard hours ago. We’re shipping off with or without you in ten minutes.”

“Oh,” Ford says cheerily. “Yes, about that. I quit.”

The foreman looks at Ford, looks at Ford’s borrowed apron, looks at the chef and the buffet of trial dishes arranged on the counter in order of ascending success. He takes a breath. He lets it out. The tent flap falls shut behind him when he leaves.

“Was that important?” The chef wonders in his absence. “It seemed like it might be.”

Ford tuts dismissively. “Never mind that. There are plenty of benches I can sleep on. Now, where did that zester go? I have a combustion theory I want to test.”


	7. Chapter 7

“So how should we do this, exactly? Do you want a count of three?”

Ylsim-Adtuarak, Great God of Wolves, Guardian of the Northern Flats and Slayer of Yesunra the Ever-Hungering, wrinkles her snout at Ford in annoyance and trains the hollow black voids where her eyes should be directly through him. “Do you want me to nip you? I have waited a thousand years for this already.”

Ford shrugs, kneels, and reaches into the bag on the ground between them to pull out two stars. Brilliant, dancing blue, brighter than all the others in the constellation around him. He’d thought shooting them down would be the hardest part, or inventing a bow strong enough to reach them in the first place. But once he embraced the metaphorical aspects of the whole thing that had been surprisingly painless. Handling them once caught is another matter. Metaphor or no, they burn. He put three pairs of gloves on but judging from that roasting smell and the unearthly cold ache in his bones he's already down a layer, and they keep throwing sparks into the far corners of the cave.

“If you're sure,” he says, struggling to hold his grip. The Wolf sits up proudly, but she whines a little and pins her ears back when the frigid heat nears her face. Ford stifles a pang of primordial guilt and presses both stars in. Their light flares and fades as they vanish into the darkness of her skull.

Ylsim-Adtuarak lowers her nose to the ground, squeezes her eyes shut and shakes her shaggy head in discomfort. She bares her fangs. Ford is briefly worried he’s done something wrong, that he’s hurt her or made things worse. But then the blue glow pulses and flares back to life even brighter than it shone in the sky. An unknown force pushes Ford back against the far wall, where he throws an arm over his face until the flashes die down enough to chance another look. And for the first time in a thousand years, the Wolf God opens her eyes and sees.

The intensity of her gaze transfixes Ford. He’d just gotten used to the eerie blankness that was there before. Watching her real eyes dance with a thousand illuminating points now takes some adjustment. For that matter, so does looking at the rest of her now that she's twenty feet tall. They really should have done this outside

“THERE _YOU_ ARE,” she booms, unblinking. She cranes down and snuffles at his hands, his hair, his hands again with a deferential nudge for the best behind-the-ear scritchers in her domain. When she is satisfied taking in every detail of Ford she turns her attention to her own paws, then the faded ancient murals on the walls and ceiling interspersed with his designs and illustrations. Her mouth splits in a toothy grin. “THERE EVERYTHING IS!” She leaps to her feet and starts gamboling wildly around Ford, taking reasonable care not to crush him underfoot in her excitement. “THE STONE! THE ICE! THE SKIES!” Her wagging tail makes a sharp breeze spill from the cave across the tundra. “MORTAL, YOU HAVE RETURNED MY SIGHT TO ME.”

Ford chuckles as he removes his destroyed gloves. “I said I would try, didn’t I? So, what happens now?”

“NOW?” She throws her head back and laughs, a rolling crack of thunder. “NOW WE ARE FREE.”

Before Ford can answer she nips him by his jacket hood and flings him in the air like a toy. He lands on the nape of her neck and grabs her spotless white fur for dear life as she bolts through the mouth of the cave.

They hit the open expanse at full sprint. Villages and towns vanish behind them as quickly as they appear, leaving the sleeping inhabitants unaware of any visitors but perhaps feeling a little bolder in their dreams. The Wolf leaps and zigzags joyously, never on one straight path for long. A tongue the size of a kayak lolls from her black lips, dripping drool that leaves shallow ponds atop the permafrost in their wake. Ford has never seen her this lively since she first stumbled towards him out of the mist, blind and sullen, drawn by the scent of his campfire. She takes a mighty breath and howls.

Ford laughs despite the wind doing its best to rip the air from his lungs. Eventually he realizes they do have a destination: distant now but looming larger every second, she is running for the towering ice wall that marks the edge of the world, or at least this part of it. “Do you think we can get past it now?” he asks, waving at a herd of scandalized caribou in passing.

“I DEFY ANYONE TO STOP US,” the Wolf snaps. A small storm system forms from the fog of her breath. “THE WITCH ON THE WALL WOULD KEEP US TRAPPED HERE FOREVER IF SHE COULD. BUT I WILL MAKE HER FREE US.”

She howls again. An aurora takes shape in the night sky, shimmering columns of teal and azure winding towards a single point in the horizon. The Wolf laughs victoriously and follows them.

They run out of solid ground before they get to the wall. Ylsim-Adtuarak sees the dark treacherous waves ahead and looses a growl that rattles Ford to his own back teeth. She leaps from one ice floe to another across the  moat, sometimes fighting for purchase but never falling or hesitating. The final gap takes all her strength, and they land heavily on the other side. She skids, crouched low, sending Ford rolling forward off her shoulders from momentum.

Ford slides to a halt at the base of the wall and cranes his head up at it. Up close, he realizes she could never make that jump, even at her new size. It’s enormous, at least the height of a small mountain but all but impossible to climb, judging by the slippery smoothness and perfect vertical slope. At the top, standing under the last of the dancing lights and looking just as immovable, the Witch awaits them.

Her hair is blue-black; her skin only a little lighter. She wears a massive cloak, thick with pelts and woven seaweed near her shoulders but growing thinner and lighter as it cascades down and outward from there. Her right hand curls around a staff of polished driftwood made from an entire tree. “Ara,” she greets, sounding unsurprised. “You return to me.”

Ylsim-Adtuarak snaps her jaws ferociously. “SILENCE! I WILL TOLERATE YOUR IMPRISONMENT NO LONGER. DESTROY THIS ACCURSED BARRIER.”

“To what purpose?” The Witch asks calmly. Her voice carries unnaturally, amplified by the ice and waves so she needn't raise it to be heard.

“SO WE MIGHT LEAVE.”

“And where will you go?”

“OUT.”

“That is not an answer.”

“TOY NOT WITH ME,” Ylsim-Adtuarak snarls. Her eyes dance with freezing flame. She crouches low. Ford reaches for an arrow and braces to help however he can when she leaps up the wall to attack. Instead, she dives down and starts scrabbling at the ice below it with her front paws.

It is not the most dignified display he’s witnessed.

“OPEN IT,” the Wolf demands. “OR I WILL TEAR IT DOWN MYSELF.”

“You know you can’t do that.”

“YOU CANNOT KNOW THAT. I WILL DIG UNTIL THE SUN BOILS ALL THE WATER FROM THE SEA IF I MUST.”

The Witch taps her staff by her feet a few times. “I wish you wouldn’t.” She turns glacially to Ford, as if noticing him for the first time. Light dances on the wall, or maybe it’s the gauzy sheen of her cloak draped over its entire length. “And you, mortal? Do you also desire to go ‘out’?”

“...I wouldn’t mind,” Ford admits, lowering his bow. Frost showers over him from the Wolf’s frantically digging claws. “I haven’t been stuck here that long, but I’d like to see what else is out there.” He shrinks a little under the cloaked woman’s continued attention. “Uh. We haven’t met. What should I call you?”

Her smile is inviting in the same way a deep ocean trench is. She tips her head towards the Wolf. “What did she call me?”

Ford swallows. “I’d rather not say.”

“IGNORE HER.” The Wolf jumps up and paces the wall in tight agitated circles, hackles raised. Whining noises tear from her throat whenever she tilts her head to glare at the top. “SHE WEAVES TRICKS AND FALSEHOODS AND EXPECTS GRATITUDE IN RETURN. SHE STOLE MY EYES AND HID THEM FROM ME.”

The woman on the wall sighs. A wave spills up over the ice and soaks Ford to his knees before retreating. When she speaks again, there’s a note of regret in her voice. “I only put them up there for a while, until you can use them responsibly. The last time you had them you ate all the sheep in the fieldlands to the south, don’t you remember? They were very upset about that.”

“THAT WAS DIFFERENT. I WILL LEAVE ENOUGH SHEEP THIS TIME.”

“Ara, sweet snowflake, you are making a scene.”

“LIES,” Ylsim-Adtuarak thunders, rolling on her back and wriggling hatefully. “FILTH AND LIES. AND I HAVE TOLD YOU I DO NOT LIKE THAT NAME.”

“Why are you always like this?” the woman on the wall laments, leaning on her staff. She turns again to Ford. “I apologize. She is always like this.”

The Wolf howls again. There is less grandeur in it now than before. “MOTHERRRRRRRRRR.”

The cloaked woman shakes her head. “You only think of yourself. Without your protection, how will the mortals here brave the perils that face them fearlessly? How will they find their way in the dark? You may command the stars, but you must also guide your charges to comprehend them.”

“Oh, well, about that,” Ford says. “They actually have their own now.” He points sheepishly up at a small blank patch in the sky. “I had to take few practice shots. Some people caught them in lanterns, and they’re already figuring out how to split them up and wire the light between houses.” He rubs his chin. “Which shouldn’t work at all, to be honest, but it’s obviously some kind of creation myth so I suppose there's a bit more leeway there.” Ford becomes aware of two unimpressed stares bearing down on him and feels like he finally gets the resemblance. “I shouldn’t interrupt. You two must have a lot to talk about. Should I just?...” He points at a chunk of ice on the ground nearby. “I’ll wait over here. Please, take your time.”

So Ford goes and sits alone while the Wolf God and her mother air a millennium of grievances back and forth at each other over the wall. He takes his bow off and twirls it on the ice, melting a tiny hole via friction. By the time they've unpacked the worst of it and start negotiating a curfew while dawn breaks pink and orange over the wall’s far perimeter, he finds himself composing the opening paragraphs of a letter in his head. One he knows he'll never be able to send, more than probably. But just in case.


	8. Chapter 8

“Holy shit. Stanford?”

Ford’s eyeroll is wasted on the cold gray tiles pressed into his face where he landed, but he goes through with the gesture anyway out of habit. He’d thought he was past these.

“Of course,” he says, using his rifle for support to push himself painfully up from the floor. “Of course it's me. Of course it's you. What a happy surprise.”

Ford looks up and pauses. He's well prepared by now for a figment wearing Stanley’s face trying to deceive him. It's less usual for the figment to have such different ideas about hairstyling. The false Stanley edges closer and gives a wary look at the gun, but he seems most interested in the deep oozing cut above Ford’s eyebrow. “Whoa. Took a few knocks on the ride over, looks like. You okay, pal?”

Ford shoots to his feet and teeters dangerously on a twisted knee before forcing himself back in control. A bitter laugh outruns his teeth. “Yes, Stanley, you did it, you saved me. Now everything is back to normal and there's nothing to be concerned about!” He throws his hands up and turns a haphazard rotation to see what Bill’s done with the rest of the basement this time. Judging from the sloppy illusion work, he's either losing his touch or thinks Ford is. It’s too deep, for one, with a second level and entire rows of monitors that shouldn't be there. That’s to say nothing of the portal itself, which is still humming softly but idling without a stable enough connection for continued passage. It's octagonal. Ridiculous. “In fact,” Ford declares, loudly enough to reach the darkest corners of the room, “why don't I just drop everything and shake your hand to thank you right now?”

The false Stanley smiles nervously and pulls a rag from his pocket. “I don't know about that, but you're bleeding pretty bad. Take this.”

A voice rings out before Ford can slap the offering away. “Don't touch him!” The command echoes indistinctly, but pounding footsteps on the metal walkway above betray the speaker's position in time for Ford to catch a glimpse of him, wild-haired and wild-eyed, racing down the stairs two at a bound with one six-fingered hand scarcely brushing the rail for support while the other grasps a large wrench.

“Oh, for God's sake,” Ford says, and takes the rag out of spite.

The man leaps to the floor and stumbles over to them, already winded. He makes some hurried shooing motions, but his eyes never leave Ford’s face. “Stanley, back away. I mean it.”

Not-Stanley stays where he is. “Hey hey hey, take it easy! I’m just trying to help, uh. You.”

“That's exactly why you should stand back,” the man insists, raising the wrench halfway like a bat. “Whatever it is, it could try to manipulate your emotions to its own advantage. We have to be careful!”

“Your stance is all wrong,” Ford informs him, dabbing the cloth to his temple. “A child could disarm you.”

“Would you like to test that?”

“How about if everybody shuts up for two seconds instead?” Not-Stanley plants himself between them, pinching the bridge of his nose. He taps the wrench-wielding man on the chest. “Look, I don't get what you’re so keyed up about. You said you wanted to make contact with something from the other side and it fell down right in front of us.” He gestures to Ford. “Literally. So let's make contact, huh?”

Ford can see skepticism wage war with nausea behind the man's skewed glasses. He still hasn't fully recovered his breath. “Not with that. Not with him.”

They argue quietly but urgently amongst themselves for a while. Ford sits on the edge of the portal frame and takes his chance to examine the false Stanley’s face more blatantly while it’s turned. One of his eyes is the wrong color, but not yellow, and he’s…different from what Ford recalls. Healthier. The man with the wrench is clearly sleep deprived and undereating (or just thin; was he ever that thin?), but there’s more color to his skin than Ford would expect, fewer ghosts hiding in the hollows of his unshaven face. They’re so damn young, Ford realizes. Younger than he was.

He pulls the rag away to assess the damage and has to brush a few stray cloth fibers from the edge of the wound. Bill seldom has patience for that kind of detail.

Not-Stanley claps a reassuring hand on his brother’s shoulder and shakes it a little. Ford notices now that they're wearing matching worksuits with a strange colorful logo embroidered on the front pockets. A pear, maybe? Not-Stanley has the sleeves of his rolled up to the elbows, and the...other one looks like he's on his fourth day pulling the same suit out of the hamper, but it's definitely a uniform. “You sure you wanna be all weird about this?” Not-Stanley finally says at a normal volume. When he doesn't get an answer he shakes his head. “Fine, suit yourself. I’m gonna do our job.” He takes his hand away and turns to wave at Ford a little too dramatically. “Hey, hi, how’s it going. Welcome to here. You’re from the future or something, right?”

“He’s not from the future,” grumbles the man to whom Ford has decided for his own sanity to refer as the Young Scientist.

“He’s old,” Not-Stanley points out. He takes half a cigarette out from behind his year, but puts it right back when he sees Ford's expression. “Older,” he amends. “Sorry.”

The Young Scientist looks Ford up and down. His face twists. “Well, he’s certainly not _my_ future.”

Arrogant. The Young, Arrogant Scientist.

“You don’t know that! How do you know that? It’s the future, anything can happen!”

“Because that’s not how the Omni-Gate works, Stanley! It’s not a simple linear transporter, it’s a complex transdimensional gateway tapping into any one of an infinite number of parallel--”

“I’m sorry.” Ford holds a hand up. “Omni-Gate?” He stares. “You're not serious. That's the best you could do? That's the best anyone could do here? What, is your nickname ‘Hexus’? Or ‘Sextant’?”

“Sex tent?” Not-Stanley mumbles.

“The name describes the function,” snaps the Young, Arrogant, Completely Oblivious Scientist, hunching his shoulders like a petulant child. “I don’t remember ever asking for your input.”

“Or anyone else’s, clearly, if that’s the one you went with.”

“Does he mean like at that rock festival? Because you didn’t even go to that, it was just me and Ca--”

“It’s ‘-tant’ with an A, Stanley!”

“Well excuse me for breathing!”

“You’re oversimplifying it anyway,” Ford says as he pulls his left boot off. A stream of periwinkle sand cascades out when he overturns it and piles softly on the floor. “They’re not just separate parallel streams. There’s causality between dimensions. A powerful enough disturbance in one can have a spillover effect on the very fabric of the others closest to it, independent of your usual historical branching. Opening bridges between realities only makes the fallout more dangerous.” He gives the boot a few good taps to dislodge the crab still gamely holding on in there. “Which brings me to my question, if you don’t mind. Who else helped you?”

He was really only talking to one of them, but they answer together. “What?”

Ford puts his boot back on and grinds his heel to test the fit. “Who else helped you build it?” he repeats. “This portal--”

“Omni-Gate.”

“--This _portal_ is too advanced to construct and operate with the resources and personnel you have here alone.” Ford stands. “So where did the rest come from?”

“I mean, they put some of the parts together back at the main lab before shipping ‘em here,” Not-Stanley says, scratching his cheek. “Does that count?”

His brother shushes him. “We built it together with a colleague of mine, not that it's any of your business.”

“I learned how to use a blowtorch!” Not-Stanley boasts, tapping his too-pale eye until it clinks like a marble. “Eventually.”

“Then I'd love to discuss this with your colleague too,” Ford says, and steps closer. “Maybe go over some of the blueprint designs. Or do you work with him remotely?”

The Young Scientist bristles. “I don't know what you're implying, but you seem awfully eager to get your hands on detailed information about our machine.”

“Because I know what it takes to build one of these! And a handful of--” Ford flounders for a hateful enough word. “-- _Undergrads_ couldn't possibly manage it on their own! You can’t expect me to believe there’s nothing else going on here!”

The Young, Arrogant, Completely Oblivious, Utterly Reckless and Absolutely Lying Scientist intrudes dangerously far into Ford's personal space. “Or maybe you just refuse to believe it because we did something you never could!”

“You have no idea who I am or what I've done!”

Static crackles from a ceiling speaker just as Not-Stanley elbows himself between them again. The voice on the other end is apologetic.

“Say, fellas? I know we’re busy being flummoxed right now, but did y'all want me to power down while we figure this out? ‘Cause we’re using up an awful lot of juice, but if we do a full restart I’ll need a few hours to boot through all the safety checks again.”

“Absolutely not!” Ford barks, hurling the rag down so forcefully it makes the other two jump. He snaps his fingers at the darkened windows of the control room hiding the intercom. “I’ve seen enough here. I'm done. Keep it running and let me back through.”

“Where to?” Three voices ask him.

“Anywhere," Ford says. "Roll some dice if you have to." He glares at his doppelgänger, who glares right back, and what's truly maddening is the prospect that nothing else looks out of those same eyes with him. "And if you know what's good for you, you'll shut it down after me and dismantle it.”

They lock the portal onto a new dimension shortly, after some quick calibrations and a fifteen minute argument over the intercom that ends with Ford begrudgingly carrying a backpack full of food and medical supplies and the Young, Arrogant, Suspiciously Defensive Or Perhaps Just Impossibly Lucky Scientist withdrawn sullenly into the control room. Which is probably the best thing for everyone's sake. Ford steps up to the swirling blue light like an old friend and doesn't bother wondering where it's taking him.

“Hey.”

Ford turns with one hand on the frame. Not-Stanley is watching him from behind the painted warning lines with a strange expression.

“You said I saved you earlier.”

“I was being ironic,” Ford sighs.

“Yeah, ass, that's the problem. Like it’s a stupid joke to you.” He contemplates the scuffs on his shoes for a minute. His false eye moves almost as convincingly as the real one when he looks up to search Ford's face. “Are we...are we not okay, where you're from?”

Ford 's mouth presses thinly. “There's no point dwelling on it.”

“I guess." Not-Stanley's face relaxes, as if to say it's not the answer he wants but he knows it's all he'll get. Brightening a little, he taps his own forehead. "Can you tell me what happened there, though?”

The portal waits, impatient. Ford considers his answer carefully while the charge tugs at his hair. “Barfight,” he finally admits, and steps through before he can see if it earns him a smile.

He emerges in a desert that used to be a seabed, littered with giant shells and the bleached husks of ancient coral. Yellow grass tufts and reeds the size of elm trees sprout from the cracks in the parched and flaking ground. He is utterly alone, and expects to stay so for a while.

It's half a relief.


End file.
